The Present Voice

Literature & Fiction

SEKIGUCHI, Ryoko

History & Criticism

Threadsuns Press

The Meadow and the Misread

Halper, Max

In January 2015, Karl found himself writing a series of poems that marked a distinct stylistic departure from his previous writing. A year-and-a-half after beginning the project, he bundled the poems together under the title Human Abstract, and, after whittling the collection down, he found himself with a nearly 200-page manuscript. Before his death in Sept. 2019, he expressed a clear wish that these poems might reach a wider public. Night-utterances written in the hours before dawn, Human Abstract, chronicles the passage from winter to spring, and explores the implicit mystery of what it is to be a human in time, capable of humor and longing, desire and violence: gone in a flash. The poems are a reflection of life, breathing, aching to be read.

Human Abstract

Parker, Karl

Poetry

History, like "light untied and undone," disperses itself across time and memory. The poems in THIRST & SURFEIT reach into these fragments to interpret and sing interactions of human and environment, spirit and subsistence. Whether exhuming a bog body, riding swells with a woman pirate, rediscovering a long lost garden, or lofting a futile resistance to an oppressive regime, the protagonists in these poems understand that the "barest contraction/makes birth into exile." Reclamation is a practice of resilience, of resourcefulness: that is what these historical fragments and splinters reveal. They pierce our complacency with the terms of survival: "What is real/deforms its witnesses." Hunger signals necessity and aspiration, both thirst and surfeit. Drawing on the resources of the past, these poems make the present resonant and immediate."In Elizabeth Robinson's enlivening THIRST & SURFEIT, the reader is lead through approximately three millennia of radical spiritual and material. Robinson's incomparable archeological-phenomenological poetics attend to the tensions of the body, law, text, and spirit via deep time voyage and vision: 'There is no such authority / as the traveler's, the one lost in the wilderness, looking forward / to it and forbidden its foresight, ' she reminds us. The poems in THIRST & SURFEIT are compelled by the ecological, ekphrastic, feminist, and mystic, demonstrating that one mandate of the poet is to 'venture to understand the vessel on which [they] sailed' as well as attend to 'the artifacts, ' which--in Robinson's work, as always--'have pulses, ' alive in lyric landscape and the inciting ethics of listening."--Caryl PagelPoetry. Hybrid.

Thirst & Surfeit

Robinson, Elizabeth

See the best price to sell, buy or rent books by the Threadsuns Press publisher. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Threadsuns Press